The Fist of a Ghost: White Nostalgia and the DNC Protests

Political nostalgia signifies the death knell of the white Left. Denver has been overcome with it. First it was the slogan "recreate 68" which has received dozens of varying and historically intriguing critiques. Even so, the folks in Recreate 68 made compelling cases for the evocation of that complicated year referring to Paris, May of 68 and a spirit of revolution. While I don't share their analysis, they've made a concerted effort to defend their title and largely I bought their line.

Perhaps, that is, until it excused an even more nostalgic project.

A new ghost of the sixties has arrived--Come Up to Denver---a website and video based on Crosby, Stills and Nash's song Come To Chicago. I am not sure why people believe that youth culture can be revived via nostalgia for the 60s white counter-culture, a subculture fraught with racism, patriarchy, hierarchical leadership, and other systems and structures rejected by the best of contemporary activism.

Let me say it once and for all : I think evoking the sixties as an inspiration to today's youth is a bad idea.

When I saw the video Come Up to Denver for the first time I couldn't decide whether I should laugh or cry. Sometimes the only response to cliché is cliché.

Unlike Denver, the people in the video are largely, if not entirely white. The musicians are wallowing in an earnest glorification of musty music. The music video contracts grim shots of left-over, white hippies in Denver with Civil Rights era masses protesting in full force. In desperation, the contemporary outmoded hippies cling to a few uninspired, hand-scrawled signs.

The image conveyed by so-called activists is pathetic. It fails to capture the truly inspirational actions going on throughout town--productive projects like The Derailer Bicycle Collective, INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, Food Not Bombs, Cafe Cultural, Cafe Nuba, Sisters of Color United For Education, Art in Motion, Transform Columbus Day and Denver Open Media.

A misused image of Abu Ghraib and an illustration of a black man tied to a chair accompany the badly sung song. These two still images are two of the few photographic references to the struggles of people of color. Static, frozen icons, bodies of color become symbolic objects for the misguided benevolent white activists to giddily, happily try to demonstrate on behalf of. The paternalistic objectification and inability to include moving images of people of color betrays the resurgence of 60s style racism, a wolf hiding in hairy, white skin.

What's stranger than what is shown is that the video erases inspirational contemporary histories--the recent May 1st immigration marches in Denver where tens of thousands protested corrupt immigration policy, the hundreds of thousands in the streets who protested the Republican National Convention and the millions around the world who protested the war.

The video fails to address local issues of race--police brutality, housing foreclosures, mass incarceration of people of color, failures of the education, health, and social service sector alike. By erasing activists of color and the issues communities of color face, the video traffics in a white supremacist, white cultural narcissism even the two-party system has moved beyond with its problematic tokenism of Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell.

Rarely do I use my blog to criticize people trying to do good things. In this case, my sincere belief is that without a harsh critique of the video's erasure of people of color, glorification of outmoded, anachronistic, failed 60s movements, and inability to appeal to all but a handful of nostalgic, white, aging hippies unaware of white supremacy, many far from Denver might assume that this video represents what the protest movements at the Democratic National Convention will be all about.

Fortunately, this assumption can be dead wrong.

With fierce actions promoting immigrant rights, combating the prison industrial complex, racist military recruiting strategies, the white gentrification of communities of color, and environmental racism, the protests at this years conventions have the opportunity to be a new jumping off point in anti-authoritarian organizing where the much neglected issues of race finally come to the surface as the anachronistic white Left withers into oblivion.

6.26.08. COME UP TO DENVER AND RECREATE 68 ARE TWO ENTIRELY DISTINCT PROJECTS. RECREATE 68 DID NOT PRODUCE THE VIDEO COME UP TO DENVER.

Gangs: Please Get out of the Capitalists' Bed

Eager to find reasons to police poor people and people of color, city officials, most often in bed with or inseparable from developers, have many reasons to love gang violence. Its neither their run of the mill perverse love of structural oppression nor their glee that poor people are focusing their rage on each other rather than the ruling class that wets their whistle.

No, developers LOVE cops.

They love reasons to escalate police presence and justify it in the name of "crime," a codeword for poverty and color. Now, whether cops or developers intentionally escalate gang violence is debatable. Certainly, if cops and feds are snooping around and trying on the panties of Quakers and other non-violent anti-war activists, chances are they've also infiltrated and influence the habits of street gangs. As such, it would not be unthinkable that agent provocateurs actually spur rivalries between street gangs in order to justify an escalation of militarized policing.

In Denver, as we've seen the beginnings of Guiliani style "broken-windows policing" we have also seen the media focus on the rise of gang activity. As millions of dollars are being funneled into the city to bolster police presence in time for the Democratic National Convention, reports of high incidence of crime pave the way for the bullies in blue to enter our neighborhoods. Police arresting poor people is great for developers--they win contracts for building prisons in rural communities and condos in urban communities. As people of color and poor people suffer, the rich get richer.

This scam, of course, is called capitalism. It is what we want to destroy.

In destroying capitalism, we have to determine what our relationship with gangs will be. I choose to avoid relationships with the gangs in power: the police, the corporations, and most politicians; however, street gangs may be a different matter. Building power from below requires working with all of those who are being oppressed by the contemporary society. The anti-police attitude of many gang members and gang associates should be a natural bonding point as we engage in self-defense against the perpetual environmental, military, and economic attacks on our communities from the capitalist elite and their armed brutes.

Gangs destroying each other will only aid capitalist development and justifications of militaristic presence in our neighborhoods. Gangs attacking developers, police, and agents of gentrification might be an early sign of class resistance akin to militant attacks on coal companies, developers, and gentrifying tourists that occurred in the Appalachian mountains during the seventies.

Attacking developers, state terrorists (police), and agents of gentrification will only be useful if communities take as seriously, rather more seriously, the importance of creating local economies, vibrant cultural and educational institutions, and spaces for joy and liberation that are local and connected globally to other localisms.

To sum up: gangs should stop fighting each other and pick more ethical targets. Rather than picking on gangs, we should find some targets too. In the meantime, working with all members of our community, both within and out of prison, gangs, or even more dangerously the 9-5 workday, we should create an autonomous, effective, and uncompromising culture of liberation hellbent on replacing capitalism with an autonomous, egalitarian, just, and pleasurable form of existence.

Community Cultural Centers

In looking at Denver, one thing we are desperately missing is a community-based cultural center--especially a place that actively brings together multiple cultures, races, disciplines, and media in a spirit of solidarity, learning, and action. In conversation with my roomie Jessi, we often talk of the East Side Cafe in Los Angeles as an example of an incredible cultural space. My own personal favorite is Mess Hall in Chicago. Hopefully, as Denver grows, we can create a space to fill this need.

Nia King's Borderlands Project

Many of you are probably familiar with Nia King's zine Borderland: Tales From Disputed Territories Between Races and Cultures. Its available at The Queer Zine Archive Project. If not, not you should get familiar. And in the meantime, Nia has put out a call for submissions for Borderlands 2! The call is below:

I am currently seeking personal stories and visual art on the theme of FAMILY for the upcoming issue of my compilation zine about mixed-race, bicultural and transracial adoptee identities. Stories should be
non-fiction and no more than 800 words. No poetry please. Visual art should be black and white and replicate well in a copy machine (minimal grey tones). Submissions are not due until JUNE 1st, 2008, but please don't wait to start writing! Your stories are valuable, and it's time to bring our often neglected cross-cultural and multi-racial experiences from margin to center by telling our own stories!

Send submissions to oxette    (at)   riseup.net. -- Nia King